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Sunday, 30 July 2017

The DoT is in process of formulating a National Telecom Policy that will focus on areas such as Internet for all, next-generation technologies like 5G and Internet of Things (IoT), skills development, and security, among others.The discussions held a week ago were around policy and regulatory framework, spectrum framework, security requirements for telecom networks, ease of doing business, and even manufacturing and exports. Ideas around cloud economic zones, aligning of the Center and states to achieve telecom objectives, and devising network and regulations for IoT devices, were mooted.The DoT plans to go for a wide consultation and outreach before finalizing the new policy.The Department of Telecom (DoT) has already held its first round of discussions with operators, industry associations and research organisations on the broad contours and key focus areas under the new telecom policy, which the government wants to bring in by 2018."We're expecting the draft of the new telecom policy to be out by December, the working groups are being created as we speak," telecom secretary Aruna Sundararajan said on the sidelines of a CII event on fintech.DoT plans a wide consultation and outreach before finalising the new policy, and has said it will invite views from the likes of Apple, Google and Amazon, along with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), during consultations on NTP. It will also seek views of the public at large.Source HERE.

Thursday, 27 July 2017

Leading ahead from NR technology, Samsung and Arqiva using mmWave has done it. Leading UK communications infrastructure company Arqiva and Samsung Electronics have today announced that the first field trial of 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) technology in the UK and Europe is now live in central London.Despite a link distance of several hundred meters, the system has established a stable two-way mmWave link with downlink speeds of around 1Gb per second at the CPE. Allowing for simultaneous streaming of more than 25 UHD 4K TV channels as an illustration, this more than meets the needs of today’s typical household with considerable room for future growth.The primary aim of the trial is to demonstrate the stability of the FWA service, and its potential as a fast-to-market and cost-effective alternative to fibre for connectivity to homes and businesses.Powered by Samsung’s 5G network solution and customer premises equipment (CPE), and using Arqiva’s 28GHz millimetre wave (mmWave) spectrum, the 5G FWA system consists of three main components:A Radio Access Unit located on the rooftop of Arqiva’s Fitzrovia office wirelessly links to an easily installable CPE – or router – located by a window inside Arqiva’s nearby headquarters. Samsung’s system – which implements intelligent beam-forming technology and high-frequency mmWave spectrum – then provides high bandwidth connectivity. In commercial implementations, the compact access unit can be mounted on lampposts or similar street furniture to provide reliable gigabit-per-second service to neighbourhoods and businesses alike. The final component is Samsung’s virtualized core – responsible for managing user connections and data routing from Arqiva’s network to the internet – which is running on Arqiva’s data centre servers.Source HERE Samsung News.

Wednesday, 26 July 2017

Trai has held discussions on the latest IUC consultation paper, including a special workshop on the costing model each telco has, and an open house discussion. It has said it will give its recommendations soon.Earlier TRAI recommended govt to levy a Rs 1,050-crore penalty on the carrier for allegedly not providing adequate points of interconnect to Jio, against which Vodafone has knocked the court. This time Vodafone has against filed petition against TRAI for debunking over IUC (Interconnect uses charges) issues. This one is the second such case on IUC that the telco has filed against Trai. The first instance was in November 2015, when Vodafone challenged Trai's move to reduce IUC to 14 paise per minute from 20.It’s a transparency petition… since it is incumbent upon the regulator to share cost models with all the stakeholders, in its consultation process, which they have not done, despite repeated requests,” said a legal executive who has seen the petition.“Since they haven’t shared the cost model, it is violation of principles of natural justice… It is also violating Section 11 (4) of the Trai Act, which provides that in carrying out functions of Trai, it must do so transparently,” the person, who did not wish to be named, said. The matter is set for a Friday hearing.

Section 11 (4) of the Trai Act, 1997, states that “the Authority shall ensure transparency while exercising its powers and discharging its functions”.

Vodafone India has taken the ground of transparency, after the Supreme Court had struck down a Trai regulation that made it mandatory for telcos to compensate subscribers for call drops, holding it as “arbitrary, unreasonable and non-transparent“.original news from HERE

Friday, 21 July 2017

LTE-Advanced Pro is a new marker for LTE starting with Rel-13 onwards. According to 3GPP, “the new term is intended to mark the point in time where the LTE platform has been dramatically enhanced to address new markets as well as adding functionality to improve efficiency”.

The first release of LTE-Advanced Pro was frozen last month (March 2016). It was brought to reality with quite extensive set of new functionalities as compared to LTE-Advanced. They are summarized below.

LTE-WiFi Aggregation (LWA) – the Carrier Wi-Fi is serving as a capacity booster counterpart, using radio level integration with LTE serving as an anchor. In LWA, UE is configured by the eNB to utilize radio resources of both, LTE and WLAN.

Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) – aggregates the licensed LTE carrier (serving as a mobility and signaling anchor – PCell) with SCell using the new LTE frame format over the unlicensed 5GHz ISM band.

Massive CA – extends carrier aggregation towards higher number of aggregated bands and towards the use of unlicensed spectrum for mobile networking. Massive CA enables up to 32CCs and thus theoretically provides up to 640MHz of aggregated bandwidth for a single device, while still fulfilling backwards compatibility with LTE Rel-8 channel bandwidths.

Dual Connectivity (DC) –spectrum aggregation in inter-site scenario, where a macro-cell serves as a mobility anchor, whereas the additional radio link provided by Small Cell acts as local capacity booster. DC enables to switch User Plane links among available SCs, whereas the user’s context is maintained by the overlay macro-cell. In contrary to CA, DC scheme, instead of aggregating MAC layer transport blocks, the PDCP Packet Data Units are combined, thus omitting the requirement for low latency and allowing non-ideal backhaul for SC connectivity.

3D/Full Dimension-MIMO – allow to use elevation beamforming enhancing the horizontal beam steering, and using up to 64 antenna ports with further outlook towards high frequencies for 5G.

Multi-RAT Joint Coordination – addressing joint radio resource management between various RATs including “Dynamic Spectrum Access”, where the collocated LTE and GSM systems use dedicated bandwidth part which size depends on the actual traffic demands. It uses temporal traffic statistics: e.g. when GSM load on Traffic Channel is low, LTE is allowed to use shared part of the spectrum.

As Rel-13 was frozen last month, the work on Rel-14 has already started, with the new SI/WIs targeting improvements and new features for LTE-Advanced Pro. Some of the interesting functionalities are summarized below with the target to be frozen in June 2017.

enhanced LWA (eLWA) – as LWA standardized within Rel-13, considered DL-only operation, an enhanced LWA (eLWA) is proposed within Rel-14 to overcome this limitation. The new features in this enhancement include: addition of UL transmission via WLAN, support for 60GHz, PDCP optimizations for increased data rates, and SON-related features for WLANs under eNB coverage.

CP and UP latency enhancements – shortening TTI down to a single OFDMA symbol and more resource efficient UL scheduling timing are some examples of the proposed improvements targeting latency reduction.

Light connection – discussion on a new intermediate RRC state for keeping UE context alive during short active/inactive transitions (applicable for massive MTC use case with small data transmission);

Multi-connectivity – is expected to enhance DC, by providing multiple links for a UE in two options. First option considers configuration of multiple radio links per UE, where only limited, selected set of radio links is active at any given moment. Alternatively, all of the configured multiple radio links can be active.

Marcin Dryjanski received his M.Sc. degree in telecommunications from the Poznan University of Technology in Poland in June 2008. During the past 8 years, Marcin has served as R&D Engineer, Lead Researcher, R&D Consultant, Technical Trainer and Technical Leader. He has been providing expert level courses in the area of LTE/LTE-Advanced for leading mobile operators and vendors. Marcin provides consulting services to business projects in the area of 5G related topics. In addition to that, Marcin was a workpackage leader in EU-funded research projects aiming at radio interface design for 5G including FP-7 5GNOW and FP-7 SOLDER. He co-authored a number of research papers targeting 5G radio interface design. To contact Marcin please write to: marcin.dryjanski@grandmetric.com

Thursday, 20 July 2017

5G-PPP Phase 2 project undertaken

The 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5G – PPP, https://5g-ppp.eu/ ) is a joint initiative between the European ICT industry and the European Commission. The purpose of this initiative was to rethink the infrastructure and to create next generation of communication network.

The 5G-PPP Programme will consist of at least three phases of approximately 20 large projects working in parallel in each phase. These projects will have unique goals but together will answer the Key Performance Indicators of the Programme and fulfill the vision of a new network.

The Phase 2 of the Horizon-2020 5GPPP has started at the beginning of the June 2017 and will last up to August 2020. The short description of the projects is given below:

A Global Community-www.xgnlab.com

5G ESSENCE: Embedded Network Services for 5G Experiences (https://5g-ppp.eu/5g-essence/, 06.2017 – 11.2019): devotes to the idea of Edge Cloud computing and Small Cell-as-a-Service (SCaaS). It will be done by improving the drivers and removing the barriers in the Small Cell (SC) market. 5G ESSENCE will provide a highly flexible and scalable platform, which will support new business models and incoming streams.

5GCity (https://5g-ppp.eu/5g-city/, 06.2017 – 11.2019): will build, develop, deploy and test, in operational conditions, a distributed cloud and radio platform for municipalities and infrastructure owners acting as 5G neutral hosts. This multi-tenant open platform that extends the centralized cloud model to the extreme edge of the network will be demonstrated in three different cities. The main goal of the project is to maximize the refund the investment for the whole digital market chain (users, application, cloud providers) and to solve the open research challenges in the 5G-based edge virtualization domain, including the neutral host perspective in dense deployment environments.

5G MEDIA: Programmable edge-to-cloud virtualization fabric for the 5G Media industry (https://5g-ppp.eu/5g-MEDIA/, 06.2017 – 11.2019): focuses on innovating media-related applications by investigating how applications and the underlying 5G network should interwork and be coupled. The main objectives are capitalizing and properly extending the valuable outcomes of the running 5G PPP projects to offer an agile programming, verification and orchestration platform for services, evolving network functions and applications and demonstrating them in large-scale deployments.

5G-MoNArch: 5G Mobile Network Architecture for diverse services, use cases, and applications in 5G and beyond (https://5g-ppp.eu/5g-Monarch/, 07.2017 – 06.2019): brings into practice the concepts of the expected diversity of services where use cases and applications in 5G require a flexible, adaptable, and programmable architecture. This will include the functional innovations for the key technologies required for the identified use cases (resilience and security, resource elasticity) and deployment and experimental implementation of the architecture in two use cases (sea port and touristic city).

5G PICTURE: 5G Programmable Infrastructure Converging disaggregated neTwork and compUte Resources (https://5g-ppp.eu/5g-picture/, 06.2017 – 11.2019): will develop the infrastructure that relies on a converged fronthaul and backhaul solution, integrating advanced wireless access and novel optical network domains. The concept of Disaggregated-Radio Access Networks (DA-RANs) will be adopted to allow any service to flexibly mix-and-match and to use compute, storage network resources through HW programmability.

5Gtango: 5G Development and Validation Platform for global Industry – specific Network Services and Apps (5gtango.eu, 06.2017 – 11.2019): pays attention to the flexible programmability of 5G networks. The main goals within the project are:

reduction of the time-to-market for networked services by shortening the service development cycle and by qualifying those network services to be adopted,

decrease the entry barrier to third party developers along with supporting the creation and composition of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and application elements as “Network Services”,

also boost the NFV uptake in industry via an ‘extended’ DevOps model and

the validation at scale of Network Service capabilities of the 5GTANGO platform in vertical show cases.

5G – Transformer: 5G Mobile Transport Platform for Verticals (http://5g-transformer.eu/, 06.2017 – 11.2017): will transform modern mobile transport networks into an SDN/NFV-based Mobile Transport and Computing Platform (MTP), which brings the “Network Slicing” concept into mobile transport networks by supplying and managing MTP slices tailored to the specific needs of vertical industries. The goal of the Project is to design, implement and show a 5G platform that addresses challenges such as:

enable vertical industries to meet their service requirements within customized MTP slices

unite transport networking and computing fabric, from the edge all the way to the core and cloud, and

to create and manage MTP slices throughout a federated virtualized infrastructure.

5G-Xcast: Broadcast and Multicast Communication Enablers for the Fifth Generation of Wireless Systems (https://5g-ppp.eu/5g-xcast/, 06.2017 – 05.2019): the goal of the project is to develop broadcast and multicast point to multipoint (PTM) capabilities for 5G considering M&E automotive, IoT and PWS use cases and evaluate 5G spectrum allocation options for 5G Broadcast network deployments. The project assumes also a design of the 5G network architecture with layer independent network interfaces to dynamically and smoothly switch between unicast, multicast and broadcast modes or use their in parallel.

Global5G.org: Global vision, standardisation & stakeholder engagement in 5G (www.global5g.org, 07.2017 – 12.2019): will simplify a European-led contribution to the international vision of 5G networks, dealing with a large set of requirements from different vertical industries. The goal of the project is to implement a European “5G PPP Vision” in an international context, by involving all important stakeholders.

Agata Buczkowska received her M.Sc. degree in Telecommunications from the Poznan University of Technology, Poland in October 2012. She spent 9 months at the Tampere University of Technology in Finland within LLP Erasmus Student Exchange Programme. Later on, to improve analytical skills she got also B.Sc. degree in Mathematics in 2014 from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Since then she worked in different fields of communication, including networking and optical networks planning. In Grandmetric she is involved in wireless systems research.

Horizon 2020 – Call:

H2020-ICT-2016-2

Topic:

ICT-7-2016

Type of action:

R&I

Duration:

30 Months

Start date:

1/6/2017

Project Title:

5G ESSENCE: Embedded Network Services for 5G Experiences

Objective

5G ESSENCE addresses the paradigms of Edge Cloud computing and Small Cell-as-a-Service (SCaaS) by fuelling the drivers and removing the barriers in the Small Cell (SC) market, forecasted to grow at an impressive pace up to 2020 and beyond and to play a key role in the 5G ecosystem.

5G ESSENCE provides a highly flexible and scalable platform, able to support new business models and revenue streams by creating a neutral host market and reducing operational costs by providing new opportunities for ownership, deployment, operation and amortisation. 5G ESSENCE leverages knowledge, SW modules and prototypes from various 5G-PPP Phase-1 projects, SESAME being particularly relevant.

Among the fundamental 5G ESSENCE objectives are: Full specification of critical architectural enhancements; definition of the baseline system architecture and interfaces for the provisioning of a cloud-integrated multi-tenant SC network and a programmable RRM controller; development of the centralised SD-RAN controller to program the radio resources usage in a unified way for all CESCs (Cloud-Enabled Small Cells); exploitation of high-performance and efficient virtualisation techniques for better resource utilisation, higher throughput and less delay at the network service creation time; development of orchestrator’s enhancements for the distributed service management; demonstration and evaluation of the cloud-integrated multi-tenant SC network; conduct of a market analysis and establishment of new business models, and finally, maximisation of impact to the realisation of the 5G vision.

Sunday, 16 July 2017

One of the key requirements for 5G is the reduction of network energy consumption. Example techniques to assure high energy efficiency in mobile networks include: the use of lean carrier, dynamic beamforming, efficient energy saving schemes for Small Cells, virtualization of the network and utilization of dense deployments.

Energy efficiency for 5G networks

As far as I know, there are no strict values defined in any recommendations yet regarding the specific target energy level in bits/Hz/J. However, the general target is that the energy consumption for 5G should not be larger than that of today’s networks (IMT [1]), or larger than half of what the current networks consume (NGMN [2]), while still supporting 1000x capacity increase. This means the energy efficiency of 5G systems should increase by a factor of 1000x (IMT) or 2000x (NGMN). 3GPP also wants to evaluate and compare different solutions first [3].

http://www.xgnlab.com

Energy efficiency in the network can be achieved by techniques that span from PHY layer to up to networking and architecture levels. Below a subset of those is presented.

Lean carrier design – a radio frame without (or with limited) “always-on” signals like Cell-specific Reference Signals. This approach aims at minimization of the transmission that is not directly related to data transaction. On one hand it provides more time without any transmission (at the network side) and on the other hand the UE can also be longer in a sleep mode.

Dynamic beamforming – utilization of advanced beamforming and MIMO schemes enable focusing most of the transmit energy towards a specific receiver (localized transmission), which in turn decreases the energy being dissipated over an area where there are no users, thus saving this energy.

Dynamic energy saving schemes for small cells – a concept where the network nodes transmit only when and where needed. This enables utilization of the cell being OFF in the times when there are no users to serve (according to real life measurements most cells are “empty” for a significant part of the day). An example could be an energy saving scheme with two level sleeping: deep sleep, where no synchronization is possible; light sleep, in which discovery of the cell is possible and access is possible (cell transmits only necessary signals); and in normal operation mode – enable data traffic transactions. Additionally, in this CP/UP split may be utilized, where macro sites provide control plane connectivity and the small cells are used as pure UP nodes (i.e. capacity/data boosters that can be switched on only upon need).

Densification of the network with very small cells – bringing more and more nodes to the network and reducing the ISD and distance to a user (i.e. deploying them below rooftop) reduces the pathloss and thus the necessary power to reach a user (and this in turn decreases the energy utilization at the UE side and required energy at the individual network node).

Network virtualization and advanced network sharing – utilization of single infrastructure by multiple operators, especially for dense networks, described just above, with multitude of small cells, divides the energy consumption for each participating operator. Additionally, the network slicing concept provides the possibility to utilize only the necessary functions that are tailored and optimized for a specific application. These functions can be flexibly assigned to the processing nodes, thus can be deployed in the most efficient “places” with respect to e.g., energy efficiency. Additionally, the hardware can be utilized more efficiently benefiting from pooling gains.

Marcin Dryjanski received his M.Sc. degree in telecommunications from the Poznan University of Technology in Poland in June 2008. During the past 8 years, Marcin has served as R&D Engineer, Lead Researcher, R&D Consultant, Technical Trainer and Technical Leader. He has been providing expert level courses in the area of LTE/LTE-Advanced for leading mobile operators and vendors. Marcin provides consulting services to business projects in the area of 5G related topics. In addition to that, Marcin was a workpackage leader in EU-funded research projects aiming at radio interface design for 5G including FP-7 5GNOW and FP-7 SOLDER. He co-authored a number of research papers targeting 5G radio interface design. To contact Marcin please write to: marcin.dryjanski@grandmetric.com

This blog is dedicated to describing the main components of the 5G Core Network as defined by the ongoing efforts at 3GPP SA [1].

The 5G system is being designed to support data connectivity and services which would enable deployment, by the industry, using new techniques such as Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networking.

http://www.grandmetric.com

The need for these new techniques rises due to the various different profiles of data services that need to be supported by the 5G network. So far mobile networks had been designed keeping the average smartphone user in the center but with 5G this is changing as with the boom of data connectivity various use cases having completely different data requirements have come up and the network operator needs to satisfy all these requirements as efficiently as possible.

Having such requirements in mind the 3GPP has kept the basic idea of having a flat architecture where the Control Plane (CP) functions are separated from the User Plane (UP) in order to make them scaling independent allowing operators to use this functional split for dimensioning, deploying and adapting the network to their needs easily. Another central idea in the design of 5G has been to minimize dependencies between the Access Network (AN) and the Core Network (CN) with a converged access-agnostic core network with a common AN – CN interface which integrates different 3GPP and non-3GPP access types.

Network Functions

In order to facilitate the enablement of different data services and requirements the elements of the 5GC, also called Network Functions, have been further simplified with most of them being software based so that they could be adapted according to need. The 5G System architecture consists of the following network functions (NF) majority of which constitute the 5GC:

Marcin Dryjanski received his M.Sc. degree in telecommunications from the Poznan University of Technology in Poland in June 2008. During the past 8 years, Marcin has served as R&D Engineer, Lead Researcher, R&D Consultant, Technical Trainer and Technical Leader. He has been providing expert level courses in the area of LTE/LTE-Advanced for leading mobile operators and vendors. Marcin provides consulting services to business projects in the area of 5G related topics. In addition to that, Marcin was a workpackage leader in EU-funded research projects aiming at radio interface design for 5G including FP-7 5GNOW and FP-7 SOLDER. He co-authored a number of research papers targeting 5G radio interface design. To contact Marcin please write to: marcin.dryjanski@grandmetric.com